Legendary Hollywood director Steven Spielberg believes Jews may soon have to fight for the very right to be Jewish.
“The creation of the ‘other’ and the dehumanization of any group based on their differences are the foundations of fascism,” Spielberg said while being honored by the USC Shoah Foundation this week.
“It’s an old playbook that has been dusted off and is being widely distributed today. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And I am increasingly alarmed that we may be condemned to repeat history. So once again, we have to fight for the very right to be Jewish in the face of brutality and persecution.”
The Jewish filmmaker founded the USC Shoah Foundation in 1994 to preserve the interviews with Holocaust survivors as eternal testimony. In recent years, the foundation has begun collecting the testimonies of victims of contemporary antisemitism to help combat this rising issue.
Spielberg praised the foundation’s efforts in gathering over 400 testimonies detailing the horrors witnessed by survivors of the massacres on Oct. 7 by Hamas.
“We have always been resilient and compassionate people who all understand the power of empathy,” he said.
“We can rage against the heinous acts committed by the terrorists on October 7 and also decry the killing of innocent women and children in Gaza. This makes us a unique force for good in the world and is why we are here today to celebrate the work of the Shoah Foundation, which is more crucial now than it even was in 1994.”
